Report: Flex Workshop at Innofest ’08 (IIIT Bangalore techfest)

Ramesh & I were at IIIT Bangalore on the 21st for a 4 hour Flex workshop as part of their annual techfest – Innofest. The idea was to address an audience who had little knowledge about web 2.0 world and the growing RIA technologies. Ramesh talked in detail about the RIA paradigms and the Web 2.0 technologies focusing specifically around Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Adobe LCDS and Adobe Blaze DS. The audience literally had their jaws dropping when Ramesh demoe’d Ely’s flexbook example and the anthropologie AIR application. Those demos perfectly set the tone for the subsequent session where I built a Flex Quiz application with the attendees. The crowd was damn excited to build their first flex app and I could see the excitement rising when the application was moving towards completion. There were so many questions asked as we coded, and hence, we ran out of time before we could complete the application [:(] We passed on the source code to the attendees so that they could complete it post our session.

This was followed by “Answer a question, win a Flex T-Shirt/Book”. This was quite a lot of fun and folks did answer quite complex questions (Most of them were rooting for the T-Shirt, so the competition was fierce!) On the whole, we had a great afternoon at IIIT-B talking about Flex and Ramesh played the thermo sneak peak video [part1][part2]to a few guys who specifically asked for it. We also got the Innofest T-Shirts, and thats when Pavan, one of the IIITB guy’s walked up to us and said he had designed that T-Shirt and even went on to say without Adobe Photoshop he couldn’t have done any of that. It was a real cool T-Shirt indeed and it was a proud moment for me to hear a passionate Adobe customer’s testimonial on how our tools helped him design something cool!

We did take a few pictures of the event, I havent gotten time to upload them. Most of us have been incredibly busy organizing the Adobe RIA architect summit which is happening on the 3rd of April at The Chancery, Residency Road, Bangalore. If you haven’t still signed up for it, HURRY! the seats are getting sold out in express pace! Register Now!